Donuts are delicious

I mentioned last week that my friend Debbie had evilly coerced inspired me to buy some doughnut pans and give a try at baking some at home.  I've many times popped open a can of biscuits and fried them up as donuts, but I'd never baked any from scratch.

So we did that this week...3 times!  Our first attempt was for the maple cinnamon doughnuts that Debbie had mentioned last week and actually featured today.  The recipe only makes 6, so we made them two days in a row!  I will wholeheartedly agree with Debbie that while they are really tasty, the maple flavor is just not really there.  The second time I doubled the maple and while I could taste and smell it in the batter, it seemed to cook out.

Photo via Cooking with My Kid--Ours didn't last long enough to photograph!

I would recommend these, and Emma's teachers raved to her about them (we sent most of the second batch to school to their teachers), but I will say they are good basic doughnuts, but not enough for the maple lover.

This weekend we branched out and made another of Debbie's suggestions--the dark chocolate doughnut with caramel glaze.  This recipe came Lindselicious.  It was basically cake batter cooked into doughnut shapes and then covered with caramel sauce.  I didn't use her recipe for melting caramel bits, but instead used Chris' tried and true easy caramel sauce.  I was doing 2 things at once though and didn't quite cook the sauce long enough, hence it's granular appearance.  Oh well--the taste is divine even if the appearance not so much...

A food photographer I am not--but Chris bought me a new lens for my birthday, so maybe I can improve...??

As I said--this was just cake batter, so it was a little too soft and moist for me in a doughnut, so we left them uncovered for awhile to harden up just a bit.  The taste is good, but the texture wasn't quite there for me.  But it's a great starting off point and I've had to beat the kids off with a stick to keep them away from them.  This recipe made 12 and like 6 muffins, so if the caramel had been prettier, we definitely would have sent these off to school this morning.  Next time...

I'll be linking up with Debbie in what appears to be the month of the doughnut between us at Tuesday at the Table.  Make sure to check out the links to the doughnuts we made here as well as what Debbie's got and the other linkers.  Great food to be found, that's for sure!